1987, Canada. Starring Jon Mikl-thor, Lian Abel, Jim Cirile, Denise Dicandia, Frank Dietz, Rusty Hamilton, Gene Kroth, David Lane, Jillian Peri, Carrie Schiffler, Teresa Simpson. Directed by John Fasano.

Once not so long ago, the epic rock band Spinal Tap let loose the soaring song, "Rock 'n' Roll Creation," a song with a message and structure that could very well serve as the basic building block for the movie Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, itself a rock 'n' roll creation from the expansive mind of John Mikl-Thor, himself a rock 'n' roll creation dedicated to creating rock 'n' roll creations. That the rock 'n' roll creation known as John Mikl-Thor made rock 'n' roll creations that in turn help define Mikl-Thor as a rock 'n' roll creation who himself creates rock 'n' roll creations is simply an example of how the undying spirit of rock 'n' roll permeates the very fabric of the universe, which if you believe a variety of rock 'n' roll creations, is a sweeping place full of glowing neon pink animation and chrome.

John Mikl-Thor, or Thor as he is known amongst the intelligencia, is probably best known for his role as the good son turned into a green-faced, bat-wielding zombie in the film Zombie Nightmare. That film, in turn, is his best known as a result of its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that was undoubtedly funny yet still contemptible because it spawned an entire generation of nerds who would shout out incredibly unfunny and inane nonsense during bad films, thinking they themselves were as witty as the people on the television show. These are more or less the same people who ruined Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the greater portion of mankind by reciting the entire "Knights Who Say Ni" segment at the drop of a hat and with only the most tenuous and questionable degrees of relevance to whatever was being discussed at the time.

Zombie Nightmare's core audience comes from this group as well as the Adam West completists of the world - and if you doubt such things exist, please remember that there are people who bought the special edition DVD of Carrottop's film, Chairman of the Board. In light of that chilling revelation, the existence of Adam West connoisseurs is not so great a stretch of the imagination. Regardless of any of this, the end result was that John Mikl-Thor became a legend. Many people asked, "How does one pronounce 'Mikl?' Is it like 'Michael," or does it rhyme with pickle?" To them I say only this: you want to know how I pronounce "Mikl?" I pronounce it "hero."

Although Zombie Nightmare is not without its merits, chief among them being the screen debut of a young Tia Carerre, it was not until Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare that Thor would realize his full potential for crafting a film that works not just as a piece of entertainment, but as a defining symbol of the time in which it was made. On the surface, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is little more than a rousing tale of the forces of good fighting valiantly against the forces of evil. However, peel away the surface and the viewer will discover that the movie addresses one of the great voids in the history of cinema, filling at long last the need for a movie in which a heavy metal warlord dons a jewel-encrusted loincloth and does battle with the immobile Prince of Darkness.

Although there are plenty of movies that either inspired or were inspired by the world of heavy metal music, movies actually about heavy metal are few and far between. Sure, there for a while every horror film made had to throw at least one metal track onto the soundtrack, but that was just a cheap ploy to garner the favor of guys in black t-shirts adorned with an airbrushed painting of Eddie (the corpse or Van Halen, whichever you prefer). When it comes down to movies in which heavy metal is integral to the plot rather than being just some throw-away audio candy for the soundtrack, your choices are limited mostly to Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare or that movie where Skippy from Family Ties was a metal head who summoned a head-banging demon from Hell. In light of that, the better choice is actually Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, which is something that should chill you to the bone.

Our action begins during a prologue in which a nice, respectable middle-class family runs afoul of a few demons. The mother is apparently stuffed into an oven, for starters. Seems a rather stupid way for a demon to kill someone, not to mention incredibly time consuming. It's not as if full-grown humans are easy to fit into your standard range, and believe me, I know this from experience. What happened to cool demonic ways to kill people like, oh I don't know, you could levitate someone up and crucify them in the corner where the walls and ceiling meet. Something with a little religious flash to it.

What's done is done, though, and when the husband comes downstairs in search of his sausages, he finds his wife has vanished and that the oven is shaking around. Seeing the oven shaking around causes him to immediately scream out, "Oh my God! Carol!" as if the most obvious and logical leap was to assume his wife was inside the oven instead of just taking the trash out. Or maybe he screams that every time he comes into the kitchen. Try doing it at your own house. It doesn't matter if your loved one isn't named Carol. That just adds to the fun.

The movie makes up for it in short order by delivering one of the most chilling, eerie, and amazing special effects I've seen in a long time. The husband creeps close to the oven only to have it burst open in an explosion of neon light, smoke, and music! Out pops a horrible corpse head dangling awkwardly on the end of a stick! It's sort of like being attacked by one of those coconut head souvenirs you can buy along the road in South Florida. No, it's not even that scary. My grandparents used to have one of those things sitting on a shelf in their basement. My grandfather told me it was the preserved head of a Nazi he had killed during the war, and that it sometimes came to life and would scream for its body, or at least for an update on the status of Adolph Hitler. I was terrified of that thing for years, and still prefer not to deal with it, and I can say that the corpse head on a stick popping out of the oven is not as scary as a coconut head novelty I thought was the skull of a vengeful Nazi soldier.

Some point-of-view camera work informs us of the fact that the demons got the kid upstairs as well, and then we're off to the movie proper.

Jon Mikl-Thor, with bulging biceps and rippling abs, stars as Jon Triton, leader of the hard rock outfit Triton. This is different than real life, where Jon Mikl-Thor was the leader of the hard rock outfit Thor. Triton (the band, not the man - though some would say the man is the band, or is it that the band is the man?) is the sort of band that could only exist in a movie. Rock star stereotypes that should never be mixed are thrown together in a lame attempt to create something that looks cutting edge. First you have Thor, who looks every bit the heavy metal warrior with his luscious, flowing blond locks, huge muscles, and tight jeans. But then you've got this goofy new wave dude, the nerdy manager who looks like he's about nineteen when most managers of bands that could record in a massive 24-track studio would be dudes in their forties with that "ponytail balding" combination championed by men like Phil Collins. And you've got the girlfriends, who run the gamut from snooty rich bitch to sweet and innocent. Not a single heavy metal chick among them.

And then there's the Australian guy, who is really only Australian for about 45% of his lines. The accent comes and goes with a frequency that will make you appreciate Kevin Costner's fine linguistic gymnastics in that Robin Hood film. At first, you may think that this guy is simply a bad actor who thought throwing a little Australian accent in here and there would help give his character a . character, I guess. Everyone was doing it in the 1980s, after all, in an attempt to give a dash of exotic down-under wonder to a movie. I would suggest that the drummer, Stig, is actually a clever parody of all the fake Australians running rampant in films in the wake of Paul Hogan, Men at Work, at that bleach blond Jacko guy who screamed "Oi!" in a Popeye voice while selling you batteries or attempting to convince you that you should watch The Highwayman that Friday.

Anyway, this band is pretty much the model for every time Hollywood (or in this case, Canada) tries to put together a cast of punks or metal heads or anything else. They never could tell punks, metal heads, and new wave folks apart, sort of how they could never tell hippies from bikers. And what's with the girls? You telling not a single dude in this heavy metal band dates a metal chick? And how did that guy who looks like Nicholas Cage from Valley Girl get in the band?

Never mind these questions. I'm sure Triton knew what he was doing, just like he knew what he was doing when he wrote Zombie Nightmare -- he was giving the world Tia Carerre in a hot tub.

And I'm sure he knew what he was doing when he made his band drive their custom van out to a deserted farmhouse. How do we know they're driving to a deserted farmhouse? Because they show us. They show us for quite some time. I know the rule of thumb is "show, don't tell," but that doesn't mean you have to show every single second. The driving scene goes on for the length of an entire Thor song, and by the time it was over, I was pretty sure I could find the farm house if I had to.

When asked why he has brought them to this God-forsaken (literally!) hellhole (literally!), Triton explains that it's so the band can reclaim their edge. The softness of big city success has spoiled them, and like Rocky in Rocky IV, if they want to punch out the Commies with the power of rock 'n' roll, they're going to have to get away from all that high-tech gadgetry and soft living and do squats in the barn. They just have to get away from it all. When asked why they had to drive up to Toronto, Triton explains that Toronto is where it's all happening, baby: the arts, the music, the nightlife. I thought they were leaving to get away from all those things, but who am I to question the wisdom of Jon Triton? One would think if they were leaving town to get away from distractions like parties and girls, they wouldn't have each brought their girls with them to do some partying.

One guy is even on his honeymoon, and this is how he's spending it. His wife is too much of a sport to care, or she just figured in the race between kicking back in St. Kitts or staying in a deserted farmhouse with a bunch of failed heavy metal guys, the farm in Toronto just couldn't be beat. Who wants white sand beaches, crystal clear water, and hiking trails through virgin rain forests when you can have dull gray skies, cow shit, and the song "We Love to Rock?"

When rehearsing, Thor favors his heavy metal uniform of tight black pants, a shiny silver chest-revealing tuxedo jacket, and mirror shades. I know that William Gibson tried to make mirror shades all cool with cyberpunk and all, and some people even bought that crap. To me, mirror shades have been and always shall be the domain of surfer-bodybuilders and fat Southern sheriffs. I'm not sure why Thor felt the need to get all gussied up in his concert duds for a rehearsal. It can't be because he draws power from the ensemble, because all metal dudes draw their power from their hair. That's why Metallica started to suck so bad after they all got haircuts and James Hetfield said, "I'm just tired of people telling me I look like the Cowardly Lion."

The real big problem is that the demons who killed that family ten years ago are still at this very house, lying in wait for new victims because the evil forces are too lazy to walk down the street to a more populated area. The other really big problem is that despite being isolated and out in the middle of nowhere, the house actually seems to sit a few feet from a major highway, and you can see cars going by all the time. Every exterior shot of the deserted, isolated abode features at least one car that looks like it's pulling into the driveway.

The movie then becomes a series of scenes broken up into pattern of "the band plays a tune, then one of the members gets possessed." From time to time, we get very unappealing sex scenes, the most painful of which involves Thor's beefy, oiled-up body in a shower sex scene with his gal. Not only is the thought of a buff, steaming naked metal musician unappealing, the shot where Thor goes in for a French kiss and starts waggling his tongue like an angler a foot from his woman's mouth was one of the most disturbing things I'd ever had the misfortune of seeing. I can take people being disemboweled or having their eyelids peeled off, but wet, naked metal heads waggling their soft, pink, dripping tongue like a toothless old man anxiously smacking his lips and gums in anticipation of a bit of soggy biscuit and gravy is where I draw the line.

Eventually, everyone has been possessed except for Jon, and he's thankful for the solitude since it will allow him to pen a few power ballads before the next jam session. The demons convene on his location, however, and what a scary set of demons they turn out to be? One looks sort of like a small brown version of Beaker from The Muppet Show. Another just looks like a big ol' penis - no doubt some of Mikl-Thor's clever social satire regarding the concept of cock rock. Or not. Whatever the case, the monsters all fail in delightfully humorous ways to kill Triton, who always does that thing where he bends over to pick something up, just missing getting impaled by something whizzing over his head.

Realizing that his minions are woefully inept at their job, the head demon assumes the shape of Jon's girlfriend and tries to make him concerned about the fact that everyone seems to have vanished. This head demon might have had better luck with his minions if he hadn't hired a group of creatures that closely resemble something that would menace Gumby by stealing his beach ball or something. Even the devil in Petey Wheatstraw had better minions, and all they could do was run around with their arms outstretched while wearing capes and leotards.

Angered by Jon's lack of interest in the disappearance of his cohorts, the demon begins to yell in an otherworldly voice that Jon is a fool not to see what is happening. Jon' calmly stands up and announced his big, shocking surprise:

No one has died. No one has died because no one was ever there. It was all a clever ruse conjured up by Jon to drive Ol' Gooseberry out of hiding for a final confrontation. Surrounding himself with smoke and light, Jon then makes the announcement that he is, in fact, the arch-angel Triton sent to Earth to do battle with the Dark One and send him back from whence he came, never again to plague innocent mortals. Satan responds to this revelation by transforming from a mildly attractive woman into a large rubber monster with no apparent points of articulation. Not one to be outdone, and ever the heavy metal showman, Triton transforms into a glistening rock god in eyeliner and a studded black loincloth. Just to add that extra something that makes God so happy, Triton also teases his hair up into a frenzied whirlwind of bleach blond fury. The ultimate battle between good and evil has begun!

Probably my favorite thing about the ultimate battle between good and evil is that it's a fistfight. No one in movies ever seems to consider just hauling off and letting Satan have it in the jaw as a viable means of defeating him. It's always spells and chants and old priests muttering ancient incantations while grasping crosses. Triton, however, appreciates the religious value of a solid right hook delivered by a buff, mostly naked archangel. Satan, on the other hand, tries to add a little supernatural flair to the proceedings by flinging rubber starfish at Triton, who must catch them and hold them against his barrel chest as if they were sticking to him. It's a scene that will make you ache for the technical wizardry of that scene in Bride of the Monster where Bela Lugosi was attacked by the giant octopus that lived in the swamp. Yes, in slow motion, Satan hurls Wacky Wall Walkers at Triton. You may have thought it would be fire and brimstone or lightning or piercing shards of energy fashioned from the souls of the damned, but in the end, it's just floppy rubber novelty toys. Truly, it is a scene that must be seen to be fully appreciated.

After his rubber starfish fail to do anything other than smudge the chest grease of the mighty avenging angel, Satan too resorts to simple fisticuffs in his bid to usurp the warrior of the Lord. Unfortunately for Satan, the Satan creature is mostly a statue with, as I pointed out earlier, no actual points of articulation. The best he can do is to stand there with outstretched arms and sort of twirl around, hoping Triton will be satisfied with walking directly into the blows or just doing one of those "test of strength" type lock-ups. For the most part, Satan's battle plan works okay, but in the end, not even the Devil himself can best a weight-lifting heavy metal angel lathered in oil and accompanied by a guitar solo.

Triton's final act after vanquishing his foe, the lord of evil: to look into the great beyond and, with wry confidence in his own ability, proclaim, "I'll see you again, Old Scratch!" I always thought just old bluesmen down by the crossroads called Satan Ol' Scratch, but I guess when you've worked together like Triton and Lucifer must have at some point, you develop a familiarity. It would have undermined much of The Bible's power, I guess, to have God constantly warning the Israelites about "this guy, Ol' Scratch."

Some movies offer you so many places to begin, it's difficult to chose one. Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is such a film. It goes so far beyond the realm of what is or is not "good" that such terms cease to have any meaning whatsoever. What is good becomes a secondary consideration to what is entertaining, and Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is nothing if not entertaining. It's probably one of the only movies to challenge what was at the time the very popular public opinion that heavy metal lead to devil worshiping and witchcraft. Jon Mikl-Thor dared challenge these preconceptions by presenting the world a film in which the power of metal is actually used to combat the forces of Satan. The idea that God has at his command any number of muscle-rippling, loincloth-clad, heavy metal angels would certainly upturn the worldviews of guys like Bob Larsen. What would Jerry Falwell do if he was greeted at the Pearly Gates not by a robe-wearing white male from the deep South, but by a wild-eyed David Lee Roth looking guy in assless leather pants? Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare asks the theologically important question, "What if Stryper was right?"

As far as the technical aspects of a film go, this one is okay in that someone managed to get a series of shots recorded onto film. Asking for more than that is only asking for trouble. The acting ranges from awful to below average, and it says something about your film when the best performance is from Jon Mikl-Thor. Someday I hope to make a movie with the pointlessly Australian guy from Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare and the pointlessly British guy from Honey Britches. It's actually sort of cool to see a movie where no one is a good actor. I mean, even crappy, shot-on-video horror films made by pot-smoking Slayer fans usually have one guy who is at least okay, but this movie manages to feature a cast so devoid of any real acting skill that it will make you pine for the subtle thespian styling of a middle school play.

The special effects are as good as rubber finger puppet technology can hope to deliver in a feature film. The minions are all completely and hilariously awful, looking like someone glued some Mr. Potatohead face parts to a couple hot dogs, only not that convincing. Satan himself has no mobility whatsoever, so all his action consists of being leaned slightly in toward Thor, who grimaces and makes "fight face" with over-the-top glee the likes of which I haven't witnessed since Jack Palance in Hawk the Slayer. At least one of them is somewhat animated.

The music is a curious mix of hard rock anthems by Thor and weird keyboard doodlings, possibly by a chimp. Sometimes, both soundtracks are playing at the same time. It almost makes sense when the "spooky" music plays during a scene in which someone could conceivably have a radio tuned to the movie's "All Thor, All the Time" channel (which could possibly exist in Canada and parts of the Eastern Bloc). Other times, however, it simply seems as if Thor couldn't let a scene go by without mixing one of his songs into the soundtrack as well. The best way to simulate the end result is to take two radios, sit one to your left and one to your right, then play Yanni on one and Spinal Tap on the other, at the same time. Then imagine a whole movie of that. Then imagine that movie contains scenes of a glistening naked metal hero waggling his tongue in a soft-lit orange-pink shower scene.

The plot? Well, I have to say that it's original in the sense that there are very few movies in which a heavy metal rock god strips down to a black leather loincloth to punch out Satan amid a flurry of flashing neon lights, gusting wind, and billowing mist. Yes, in that sense, Jon Mikl-Thor has written a script that is truly unique. Sure, one could ask questions like why he had to concoct this whole charade with the fake people in order to lure Satan out, when Satan seems like he was willing to come out for anyone. And you could even ask why Satan is such an idiot that he would fall for it. Doesn't he have some special sort of God-detecting skills, like Spiderman? One could also ask why Satan, lord of all that is vile and evil in the universe, would take time out to personally haunt an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of Toronto. Shouldn't he, I don't know, be corrupting priests or arranging for apocalypse or prank calling Jesus? How does he have time in his schedule for kicking around the farm possessing the drummers of go-nowhere hard rock bands?

You could also ask yourself just what sort of theological picture Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare paints for us. In the theology of Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, heavy metal is the tool of God, and sweaty heavy metal warriors are his heralds singing in falsetto voices to usher in his glory as they engage in pose-downs with Bealzabub, or Bub as he's known here. You all already know I'm not a religious man, but I'm not totally ignorant about Christian theology. From what I can tell, most Christians have in their head a particular notion of Heaven. It's all rolling green hills or it's all misty white fluff. Whatever the landscaping decisions, the vision of heaven almost never contains mostly-naked heavy metal archangels with black leather codpieces strutting about the place.

Christianity would be a very different religion if, say, Moses had cast his arms toward the heavens and yelled, "Oh Lord, what do you want?" and God had replied in a shrill falsetto voice, "I wanna rock!" Whether there would be more Christians or less as a result is probably a question that takes more mulling over than I'm willing to sacrifice, but I can certainly say that if The Bible, or more specifically Milton, hadn't painted Satan out to be such a headstrong, suave bad-ass, and instead had opted to portray him as a goofy rubber statue who can't even win a simple fistfight, there'd definitely be a lot less Satanists in the world. Instead of making him this fiery, tough sumbitch, The Bible could simple have thrown in the line, "Yea, and Satan rose from the depths, and he was a pussy." There you go. Problem solved. No one wants to follow a wuss.

Yes, you could ask these questions, but to ask these questions is to miss the point: that this is a movie about a heavy metal rock god stripped down to a black leather loincloth so he can punch out Satan amid a flurry of flashing neon lights, gusting wind, and billowing mist. Not only does it give us that, but it does so with all the technical wonder and finely-honed skill of your lower-end music videos from the 1980s. It's not as disturbing as Van Halen's bizarre zero-budget video for their cover of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman," in which two midgets dressed as an Indian chief and Lon Chaney from London After Midnight torment a captive woman until David Lee Roth as the hunchback calls the members of Van Halen who are, respectively, a Tarzan guy, a samurai, a cowboy, and Napoleon, all of whom arrive just in time for Roth as Napoleon to cast a pouty-lipped look into the camera after stepping from his white stretch limo. No, it's not as disturbing as that, but frankly, what is?

How you react to Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare depends largely on how you might react to a naked angel socking Satan in the nose, or how you might respond to a Manowar album, or possibly just how drunk you are. If you're looking for a rock 'n' roll adventure on the level of Wild Zero or even Streets of Fire, you're pretty much out of luck. Neither the music nor the movie is as good. If, however, you appreciate the fact that John Mikl-Thor was probably having one hell of a fun time making this movie, and if you aren't looking for something to take especially seriously, then you'll no doubt have yourself a riotous time. The fact that Thor does seem to be having fun, even if it's because he's indulging his own ego as both a song and scriptwriter, saves the movie from a horrible fate a more straight-faced movie might have suffered. It's not that this is a comedy, or even a spoof of horror films, as so many bad horror films claim to be these days. It's not funny; it's just fun, and that makes it worth watching.

Of course, Satan throwing rubber toys at an archangel doesn't hurt.

Labels: Horror: Satan, Year: 1987